Digicams: New Little Megapixel Monsters, Part II

Toshiba PDR-T30, Continued

What's more, the browser mode, though original and intuitive, is not very practical. The touch screen is too small to select the icons manually, and the joypad is just about impossible to use. You find yourself using a stylus to browse, like on a PDA.

The T30 is noisy as well. Perhaps those who liked the old digicams will be happy with the way the lens slides, but it will disconcert you if you are used to completely silent digicams.

Once booted, this camera is as fast as the Minolta or Canon except for its LCD screen, which needs about a second to adjust to changes in brightness. This is really a crying shame, because the detail and colors are pretty good, even though a tad behind the Canon. It focuses right every time and the automatic white balance is good. We did just notice a slight tendency to overexpose, and this makes the colors a bit paler than they should be.

Compared with the Canon and Minolta, the Toshiba is again at a disadvantage when it comes to vignetting: the difference in brightness between the edges and center can reach 16%. But it suffers very little from distortion. There is a bit of bulging in wide-angle as usual, but telephoto shots are much less deformed.

As far as we're concerned, we would rather wait for a boosted T40 with revised ergonomics.